Audit of old cinemas
Introduction
The Roxy Theater was a cinema with a capacity for 5,920 seats located at 153 West 50th Street, between 6th Avenues. and 7th, right next to Times Square in New York City. It was inaugurated on March 11, 1927 with the silent film El Amor de Dunia, produced and starring Gloria Swanson. The enormous "cinema-palace" was one of Broadway's main attractions until the 1950s and was also noted for its lavish shows. It closed and was demolished in 1960.
Early history
The Roxy Theater was originally conceived by film producer Herbert Lubin in mid-1925 as the largest and best "cinema palace" in the world. To realize his dream, Lubin turned to the successful and innovative theater operator Samuel L. Rothafel, also known as "Roxy", to put the idea into motion,[1] enticing him not only with a large salary, but also with a percentage of the profits, stock options, and offering to name the theater after him.[2] It was intended to build six Roxy Theaters in the New York area.
Roxy decided to make her theater the pinnacle of her career, in which her ideas about scenography and production are realized. He worked with Walter W. Ahlschlager, a Chicago architect, and decorator Harold Rambusch of the Rambusch Decorating Company on every aspect of the theater's design and furnishings.
Roxy's lavish ideas and many changes raised costs dramatically. Shortly after the theater opened, Lubin, who had spent $2.5 million more than budgeted and was close to bankruptcy, sold his interest to producer and movie theater owner William Fox ("William Fox (producer)") for $5 million. The final cost of the theater was $12 million.[3] With Lubin's departure, Roxy's dreams of having her own theater circuit also ended. Only one of the planned Roxy theaters was built, the Roxy Midway Theater on Broadway in Manhattan's Upper West Side, also designed by Ahlschlager. The almost complete theater was sold to Warner Bros, opening it as Warner's Beacon in 1929.
Design and innovation
Known as the "Cathedral of the Moving Image," Ahlschlager's design featured a Spanish-inspired gilded auditorium. Its main lobby was a colonnaded rotunda called the "Grand Foyer", which featured "the largest oval carpet in the world",[4] manufactured by Mohawk Carpets of Amsterdam, New York, as well as its own pipe organ on the mezzanine. Outside the rotunda was a long entrance hall that opened onto the adjacent Manger Hotel to the main entrance at the corner of Seventh Avenue and West 50th Street. The hotel (later called the Taft Hotel) was built at the same time as the theater.